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Women love lists of what they have to get done. There are too many things for her to do before she can relax. The more exhausted she feels, the more urgent it becomes for her to get everything done.

As an executive coach of working women, I know in a woman's brain there will always more to do. It seems that Marcus Buckingham knows this also and has written a new book about what the happiest and most successful women have in common. Here are five myths that Buckingham reports about the lives of working women:

Myth: With better education, jobs and pay, women are happier and more fulfilled.

Surveys of more than 1.3 million men and women reveal that women are less happy compared with 40 years ago, and compared with men.

Myth:Children want to spend more time with their working mothers.

1,000 kids were asked what they wanted from working moms. 10% said "more time." More than a third wanted mom "less stressed and tired."

The following article is based on analysis from Robert Prechter’s Elliott Wave Theorist. For more insights from Robert Prechter, download the 75-page eBook Independent Investor eBook. It’s a compilation of some of the New York Times bestselling author’s writings that challenge conventional financial market assumptions. Visit Elliott Wave International to download the eBook, free.

By Nico Isaac

If you want the latest news on the U.S. Dollar Index, try a search under its new ticker symbol, RIP. -- as in, "rest in peace." Let the record show: In the early morning hours of Tuesday, October 6, the mainstream financial community officially declared "The Demise of the Dollar" (The Independent).

The "coroner's report" cites these details as the causes of death:

An alleged (and later denied) secret meeting among leaders of certain Arab States, China, Russia, and France which aimed for the immediate discontinuation of oil trading in U.S. dollars.

And, an open statement from one senior United Nations official that proposed the dollar be replaced as the world's reserve currency.

In the words of a recent Washington Post story: "The growing international chorus wants the dollar replaced... a move that would end the greenback's six-decades of global dominance."

Before You Mourn, See The Following Chart

And with that, the line between negative sentiment -- AND -- "EXTREME" negative sentiment was crossed. It occurs when the beliefs about a market lean so far over in one direction, that the boat investors are sitting in is about to tip over... Just like the last time.

Editor's Note: The following article discusses Robert Prechter's view of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. For more information, download this free 10-page issue of Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist.

When a maverick idea becomes vindicated, there's a good story to tell. It usually involves a person (or small group of people) who courageously challenge the orthodoxy of the day -- and, over time, the unorthodox yet better idea prevails.

David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability--and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.

Underdog insurgents operate in real time.

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) lead the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak--the railroad--and not where they were strong, Medina. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch of railroad in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance--and endurance battles favor the insurgent. Just as it did David against Goliath many years before.

"And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine," the Bible says. "And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead." The second sentence--the slingshot part--is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much.

Exceptional intellectual and creative power is developed over time by minds that are focused on paying attention to an opportunity waiting to be explained.

In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he or she is merely an efficient source of insight.

Ideas aren't precious. They are everywhere, which suggests that maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention---genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany---isn't necessary at all.

There is a myth that the successful tech entrepreneur is a Bill Gates-like 20-something college dropout who strikes cyber gold in his garage. Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to a recent survey by the Kauffman Foundation, the average tech company founder is pushing middle age at 39-years-old...and...nearly five times as many founders were over 45 (24%) as were younger than 25 (5%) when their companies got off the ground. The survey asked questions of 652 U.S.-born executives at tech companies started from 1995 to 2005 with revenues of at least $1 million.

To gain the business experience and personal confidenceof going out on their own, on average, these entrepreneurs had 16.4 years between when they finished school and started their companies. Forty percent had a master's degree or a doctorate. Although more likely to have received a techie degree than the general population, only 37% graduated from computer-science or engineering programs.

Unfortunately, common sense pricing is not always common in practice -- due sometimes to lack of knowledge of how to set prices, but much more frequently simply to bad assumptions based on the unquestioned acceptance of prevailing myths and rules-of-thumb. Pricing determines the profit of your business both directly -- as the result of revenues less costs -- and indirectly -- in its influence on stakeholder (customer, vendor, employee, investor, etc.) perceptions.

Amazon.com has a reputation of frugality that drives innovation that delivers low prices and ease of purchase to its customers....which eliminates the need for comparison shopping at brick and mortar book stores. For Borders and Barnes & Noble, the online competition is putting immense stress on their brick and mortar stores' business. After the dot-com bust, Borders transferred its online business to Amazon.com in 2001. Amazon operated a new Borders website, keeping all the revenue generated aside from a commission paid to Borders. Today, Amazon.com is recognized as more than an e-tailer of books and CDs--adding downloadable videos and MP3s plus selling other companies the Web services it uses to keep itself humming.

However, if you believe your customers' loyalty is to price alone, you are destined to wind up in a "How long can we go and still add margin dollars?" battle with your competitors. If your competitors are larger -- or better financed -- or better connected-- the odds are overwhelming that you'll lose.

In making volume pricing decisions, be very careful of over-reliance on your cost details. Most entrepreneurs' cost details represent best estimates (including cost reduction ideas) -- and exclude the extraordinary (never to happen again) mistakes that caused overtime and material waste on the last order. Be assured that the highest percentage of credit problems, schedule changes and other cost impairments will come from your discounted high volume deals.

Every business must receive an adequate gross profit from each sale to pay for corporate overhead, reasonable wages and the selling expense of telling the market the value of its products and services. If fact, you must be willing to risk losing orders (regardless of their perceived importance) if the sales revenue can not be obtained at prices that yield a reasonable gross profit.

The good news is that most people believe that "price is a reflection of quality."

In a study published online, earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology were placed in an MRI machine and given sips of red wine--including the same one presented twice, with two different price tags: $5 (the actual bottle price) and $45 (a fictional price).

The subjects all said they liked the "expensive" wine better--a preference mirrored by increased activity in their prefrontal cortexes. When people know a wine is expensive, the pleasure they get from it is enhanced in the area of the brain where such sensations are processed.

The lesson, says Baba Shiv, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford: "There's a temptation among marketers to keep reducing prices. We're saying be careful before you embark on that strategy."

Believing that lack of profit results only from higher costs fails to recognize the importance of setting and maintaining adequate profit margin pricing. And if maintaining adequate margin pricing causes you to walk away from some business opportunities, so be it. The business that you lose due to high prices is the business you can't afford to maintain.

Conventional wisdomholds that memory is like a serial recording device. In reality, memory is dynamic--not static--like a paper on which new texts (or versions of the same text) will be continuously recorded, thanks to the power or posterior information.

By a process called reverberation, a memory corresponds to the strengthening of connections from a increase of brain activityin a given sector of the brain--the more activity, the stronger the memory. While we believe that the memory is fixed, constant, and connected, all this is very far from truth. What makes sense according to information obtained subsequently will be remembered more vividly.

We tend to more easily remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative, while we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in that narrative. Consider that we recall events in our memory all the while knowing the answer of what happened subsequently. It is literally impossible to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was--or is.

We want to be told stories, and there is nothing wrong with that--except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality. The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

Spreading globalizationand information technology are hollowing out the U.S. middle class. The growth of low-wage work abroad and high-speed telecommunications make it possible to handle more jobs off-shore.

The gains from free trade may increasingly be going to a small group at the top. For the vast majority of Americans income growth has all but disappeared in recent years. Inflation adjusted earnings have fallen in every educational category other than the 4% who hold doctorates or professional degrees. In university towns, like here in Ann Arbor, MI where bookseller Borders began, you will find many of those with doctorates working in retail stores.

Such numbers suggest the share of Americans who aren't included in the gains from trademay be very big. "That's a very important change from earlier generations, and it should give pause to people who say they know what's going on," says Dartmouth's Matthew J. Slaughter, an international economist who served on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

Eventually, up to 40 million service jobs in the U.S. could face competition from workers in India and other low-wage nations. That's more than a quarter of the 140 million employed in the U.S. today. Many of the newly vulnerable will be in skilled fields, such as accounting or research--jobs U.S. companies will be able to move offshorein ever greater numbers.

Since many U.S. workers aren't sharing in the gains from open markets, a political blowback is possible to create some form of income redistribution that spreads the gains from free trade to more workers.

"The mind is much more like a muscle than we've ever realized," says James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand and author of 'What is Intelligence?' (Cambridge; $22). "It needs to get cognitive exercise. It's not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark."

The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences is the same lesson learned from the Asian-American success story: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

When an I.Q. test is created, it is calibrated or "normed" so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile--those exactly at the median--are assigned a score of 100.

The Black and White Differences

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children father by black American G.I.s in post-war Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness--of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances.

The black and white gap in the United States differs dramatically by age. Flynn noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4--only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

The steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children---and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that "kids who want to be above average don't have to aim as high."

The Asian-American Success Story; may confuse causes and effects

Is this success story a question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q.?

In a 1975 study in San Francisco's Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test, the Chinese-Americans produced high I.Q.s. However, this test was normalized in the nineteen fifties and would have been a piece of cake for children in the nineteen-seventies. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal--slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.

The Asian-American success story is based upon children not succeeding because of higher I.Q.s but despite their lower I.Q.s: the Asians were overachievers. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.

There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedicationto higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. Then success breeds success. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else's--coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professional value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles.

Source: None of the Above; What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race. by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, December 17, 2007